I can tell from the coach’s face that I must be talking utter bunkum. I’m in one of my ‘exploratory’ zoom sessions, and I have decided to go all-in with my theory that we can just conduct a load of tests and the “machine” will spew out some career options. 

I mean, you know you’ve probably asked the wrong question when it is countered with, “well, that begs the question, do you know what you actually want from coaching?”

“Well, yes, I think I do, but I want to cast as wide a net as possible in thinking about what my next career could be, and to that end, it would be really useful to take the measure of my skills, abilities and aptitudes.” Wouldn’t it? The more doubtful she looks, the more I dig in: Not just personality tests, I insist, but the kind of aptitude tests we make 17-year-olds do to help them decide what they want to do and therefore what they should study at university. And not just that, why not some IQ tests as well, because I’ve never really done those. And obviously let’s Briggs-Myers this baby whilst we’re at it.

Being a coach, she’s delicate in her handling of this unorthodox suggestion. But her response is very much along the lines of, “you don’t need me to do that. Why don’t you try out all those tests on your own, and then when you have the results and you want to explore what they might mean, move on to coaching.”

Several free online IQ/aptitude tests later, I realise she is right. I have some results, and yet they’ve told me nothing, except that possibly I’m slightly above average intelligent. In fact, I don’t even think I trust that conclusion, because my ability to do them is very much down to hours of revision with the kids on their delightful excursions in verbal and non-verbal reasoning….

I then try some free personality-type tests, but those are even more useless. The more questions they ask, the more difficult I find it to summon any concrete sense of my interests, my preferences, my secret hopes and dreams. 

Everything takes on a drab greyness. My new career seems further away than ever, the path ahead ever more obscured. Any notion of a scientific method to solve this has gone the way of the dodo. 

Luckily, this is the point when a completely unrelated community cause crops up, in dire need of a champion, and I can ignore all that depressing self-improvement. Misguided developers, overstretched local authority, distressed neighbours, and lots of legalistic mumbo jumbo: Yup, that will pass the time!